LONDON.- A dark and emotional work by the German master George Grosz is to be offered in the Impressionist & Modern Art sale on 3 February at Bonhams New Bond Street, London.

Fairy Tale, an oil on canvas, was painted in Douglaston, Long Island in 1942, and is estimated at £30,000-50,000. It shows a bloated, pig-like figure gorging while a skeletal figure tugs at the tablecloth. The nightmarish atmosphere mood clearly refers to the atrocities of the Second World War.

Grosz had enjoyed great popularity in his native Germany as a prominent member of the Dada art movement, known especially for his caricatures of Berlin life in the 1920s under the Weimar Republic. But after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, the fear of life under the Nazi Party led him to emigrate to the United States that same year.

After his move to America, Grosz abruptly rejected his previous style of work, and caricature in general. With the outbreak of war, the horrors of news reports on the situation in Europe, as well as the decision of the United States to enter the war after the tragedy at Pearl Harbour, Grosz felt compelled to respond through art.

Having already delved into darker, apocalyptic themes, during the war years he plunged more deeply into the realms of the grotesque and his works from this period evoke the nightmarish worlds of Hieronymus Bosch or Goya. While undoubtedly a response to the horrors of the day, Fairy Tale is also touched by the spirit of Grosz’s early work, drawing on the acerbic social criticism and the allegorical tradition he had employed during his Berlin years.

The title of Fairy Tale directly refers to a book of children's stories that Grosz had illustrated in 1921, whose tales were in fact socialist moral lessons to warn children against the excesses of the post-war Weimar Republic. One of the illustrations from the book portrays a bloated, pig-like figure identified as a 'fat man'. This gorging character, who resembles the protagonist of Fairy Tale, is described by the narrator as a wealthy bourgeois who spends all his time eating and who never does any work to justify his voracious appetite.

In Fairy Tale, the ‘fat man’ is realised in grotesque and repulsive detail: slobbering, with bulging eyes, protruding tongue and a face flushed with greed. Executed in dark, atmospheric tones, the work has a nightmarish quality which is further underscored by lurking skeletal figures. One of these moves the hands of a pendulum clock, a gesture which symbolises a hastening towards death for the gluttonous man and acts as an ominous portent of Germany's fate.

The present lot was once in the collection of the celebrated Viennese actor Oskar Homolka, who purchased the painting after seeing it exhibited in New York in 1943. Like Grosz, Homolka also fled his native country when Hitler came to power, moving to Britain where he worked with movie world greats such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman.